Bryce Bayer, Inventor of a Filter to Make Color Digital Pictures, Dies at 83

Bryce Bayer, a retired Eastman Kodak research scientist who invented the checkerboard-like filter that has allowed millions of digital cameras to capture vivid color images, died on Nov. 13 in Bath, Me. He was 83.

The cause was a long illness related to dementia, his son Douglas said.

“Without his invention we’d still be getting only black-and-white pictures from our digital cameras,” Larry Scarff, a former chairman of the Camera Phone Image Quality Standards Group, an industry organization, said of Mr. Bayer on Wednesday. “Ninety-nine point nine-nine percent of all digital cameras — cellphones, pocket cameras, webcams and consumer digital video cameras — use the Bayer pattern to produce color pictures.”

Mr. Bayer (pronounced BYE-er), who began tinkering with cameras like the Brownie as a boy, had been at Kodak for 23 years when, in 1974, he completed his design for a device that captured detailed color images. It is known throughout the industry as the Bayer filter.

“The pattern is very simple,” said Ken Parulski, who was chief scientist for Kodak’s digital camera division until he retired in June: a grid of four boxes — each a light-sensitive element formed on a silicon chip — with two diagonally placed green elements, one red element and the fourth one blue. Light passing through the elements is filtered into an array of colors.

“There are twice as many green elements as red or blue because this mimics the way the human eye provides the sharpest overall color image,” Mr. Parulski said. And, he added, while dozens of alternative patterns have since been developed — including some by Mr. Parulski himself — “the Bayer pattern has stood the test of time.”

Photo

Bryce BayerCredit
Eastman Kodak Company

In 2009, the Royal Photographic Society of Britain presented Mr. Bayer with its Progress Award. This year, he received the first Camera Origination and Imaging Medal from the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers.

The Bayer filter received Patent No. 3,971,065 in 1976. A year later, Steven Sasson and Gareth Lloyd, two other Kodak researchers, received Patent No. 4,131,919 for their design of the first digital camera — a black-and white device that later incorporated the Bayer filter.

“Bryce was thinking about the problem of getting pieces of silicon to capture color images for photography long before the solid-state image sensors that were invented in the late ’60s,” Mr. Sasson said.

Bryce Edward Bayer was born in Portland, Me., on Aug. 15, 1929, to Alton and Marguerite Willard Bayer. He received a bachelor’s degree in engineering physics from the University of Maine in 1951, then moved to Rochester to begin a 35-year career with Eastman Kodak. There he met Joan Fitzgerald, another Kodak researcher; they married in 1954. Mr. Bayer went on to earn a master’s degree in industrial statistics from the University of Rochester in 1960.

Besides his wife and his son Douglas, Mr. Bayer is survived by another son, David; a daughter, Janet Bayer; a sister, Margery Parks; and three grandchildren.

At Deering High School in Portland, from which he graduated in 1947, Mr. Bayer spent much of his time in the school darkroom. “He, in fact, processed all of the pictures for his high school yearbook,” his son David said.

A version of this article appears in print on November 30, 2012, on page B17 of the New York edition with the headline: Bryce Bayer, 83, Digital Filter Inventor. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe